Announcer: Welcome to the Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast, business advice so

easy, you'll feel like you're cheating!

And now your host, Amy Porterfield!

Amy: Welcome to another episode of the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast, I'm Amy Porterfield and thank you so much for being here today.

I've got to take a deep breath because I have been burning the midnight oil lately. I went to Australia to speak at the Problogger event. Darren Rowse invited me to be a speaker and it was a great, great event. But when I came back, literally the minute I stepped off the plane we had jumped into launch mode for my final Facebook Marketing Profit Lab of 2013.

If you've never heard of that program, I do it once a quarter usually and it's a 6-week interactive program. It's my only program where I do 6 weeks of live Q&A, I have a VIP group where I answer questions every day throughout the program, so it's really interactive.

It's a lot of work, but it's also a lot of fun. It's a great program, my very favorite program I do.

By the time you hear this, we're going to be 4 days away from actually closing the doors and starting the program, so right now doors are open, people can enroll, it's been my best launch ever. Really exciting numbers. People that are doing great things have joined, so I'm excited about all of the new members and I love doing this program. If you're interested, you can find out at AmyPorterfield.com/profitlab. You can get all of the details and I'll link to them in the show notes.

1 Really, why I tell you that is although this has been the best launch ever, I'm really excited about the results and about the members that have joined, it hasn't gone on without a hitch. Meaning when I do launches, I do live webinars, and on the morning of the second live webinar, I woke up--and remember, I'd just gotten off the plane from Australia, so when you go on international trips you always pick up some kind of bug, and I lost my voice COMPLETELY. I could not talk. My husband had no idea what I was saying.

That has never happened to me! It was--it freaked me out, because one you don't like being sick and two, I had a webinar that had 3700 people signed up for the webinar, and I knew not all of them would show up live that morning but still, people are counting on me!

Regardless that I was in launch mode, I was more worried about these people that had signed up, took the time out to listen to me and now we were just hours away from the webinar and I couldn't talk.

I had to cancel the webinar, reschedule and Ithought "okay, I'm screwed!" Because the last time I did my launch at that exact same time last quarter, that was a $20,000 day in my launch. My webinars do really, really well when I give a lot of great free content and tell people about the program. So I thought "I just lost $20,000 today."

But you know, as an entrepreneur, someone that runs my own business, I knew that I couldn't stay in that scary place or nothing would get done. So I just plowed through, we rescheduled, we put some more strategies in place to make sure we were covered and everything turned out alright.

But because I had that big scare last week, I started to think about the makeup of my business. I'm really lucky that I have some systems in place, some processes that really work and a very small team--they're small but mighty. So I thought "I wonder if it'd be really interesting to my audience to hear about how I set up my online business." Because I know that when I first started back in 2009, I would've given anything for some of the people that I follow on a regular basis, those people that were really getting some big successes. I would have loved them to pull back the curtain, let me know how they set up their business and what tools they use to get things done. That would have been really valuable to me.

So that's exactly what I'm going to do in this podcast today, show you how I set up my business and specifically getting to the tools that I could not live without in terms of building my programs, creating my content and just running my business overall. So that is what we're going to do today. We have a lot to cover, let's go ahead and dive in.

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I create online training programs focused on online marketing, and I always have an emphasis on Facebook although I tend to go beyond Facebook in a lot of my programs.

My programs are for people that want to create an online business. I have three programs, FBinfluence, FB Ads Insider, and then the program I already told you about, Facebook Marketing Profit Lab. I also do some affiliate marketing. I do once a quarter when I find a really great program I believe in, I will promote that as well. So I do a little bit of affiliate marketing but it's definitely not something I rely on, and then I sell these three programs that I have.

Now, what I think is important to know is that I didn't start out my business this way, however I always wanted it to be this way. I knew that the day I left Tony Robbins, I wanted to create a business where I created my own online marketing programs where I taught people how to build up their online business.

However, I was brand new to online marketing when I left Tony Robbins, and so what I did is I started consulting, which I think a lot of people do in the beginning just to make sure they're building up their clientele, they're getting in the trenches, they're working with customers. I think it's important and I'm glad I did it. However it was really, really a rough time.

I didn't enjoy taking on one-on-one customers because it felt like I had a bunch of--I always call it "a bunch of little bosses." Before when I was working with Tony Robbins, I had one big gigantic boss, literally, then I quit and started my own consulting business for, really, social media marketing, and I had a bunch of small bosses that were telling me what to do.

And so I did not like that at all, but I had to go through the pains of that and it was a HUGE year of learning that first year out. And then finally when I knew it wasn't for me, I knew I wasn't enjoying what I was doing, I thought "I've got to fire my clients and I have to do what I set out to do in the beginning, which is create these online programs."

That was a really rough time for me. Quite honestly, that first year I definitely wasn't making a lot of money. I was in the red for most of that year until the end of the first year and it was a lot of ups and downs. That was an emotional year, that first year out, if I'm being totally honest, wasn't my favorite year.

3 But I quickly realized "Okay, what do I want to do and how am I going to do it?" And that was I knew I needed to start creating online programs and really run with that and put my whole focus there.

And I found webinars. Lewis Howes was the first one to introduce me to creating webinars and what they can do for your business. I feel that if you're building an online business and if you teach anything, or if you have some kind of educational business, webinars are definitely the way to go. And I'm going to tell you some of the tools I use for my own webinars. But the reason why webinars have been so instrumental to the success of my business is not only have they allowed me to have a platform to sell my programs--that obviously is a great thing--but they also allow me to build my authority and to become the go-to source in what I do.

Because if you teach someone something for an hour, and they go out and try it and they get results, they're going to come back for more, whether they ever bought a program from you yet or not. And so with me, the webinars have been a really big piece to connect with people, to teach people, to give free content, and really to build my authority.

So I can't say enough about webinars. I'm working on a podcast all about every piece of the puzzle with my webinar strategy, because anyone that wants to create webinars, I think you would find that really valuable. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way and I don't want you to make them as well, so I'm going to outline that. That's coming soon.

For the sake of this training, I just wanted to set it up and let you know how I run my business. Now I do not take one-on-one clients, I do zero consulting that 100% of my profits come from my own program and then a smaller piece comes from my affiliates as well.

In addition to that, I do a lot of email marketing, something that I didn't do in my early years when I was struggling, because of course I didn't really have a list yet. Once I really started focusing on list building, I use that list and I segment as much as I can to make sure that people are getting emails from me in terms of emails that they really want.

They're getting emails from me that make sense to the behaviors, different steps they've taken along my different sales funnels so that the emails mean something to them and they're excited to get the content and they're excited to work with me as well.

So email marketing over probably the last 2 years has been a huge part of my success as well.

4 Also, I'll say one more thing--because email marketing and list building have been such big pieces of my business, I recently created a 4-part free video series all about how to use social media, with a big emphasis on Facebook of course, to grow your email list. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes because, again, it's totally free and it's brand new, so it's all updated, really good stuff, and it kind of outlines how I've grown my email list with social media and how you could do it as well.

I just thought of that when I was talking about how I set up my business.

And then I obviously have a blog and a podcast, that you're listening to now, and I use my blog and my podcast as ways to generate content on a very consistent basis. Having a podcast that comes out regularly, blogging regularly, it really puts me on a schedule and it allows me to make sure that I’m constantly putting out new content that's valuable to my audience. That's really my platforms, those two are my platforms for generating new content.

That is my business. I have to tell you that I keep things really, really simple. I say--at least I'm trying to say "No" more often than I say yes to opportunities that come my way, because in my early years i said yes to everything--which, in some respects you kind of have to. You have to figure out what's going to work for you and what's not going to work.

If you say no all the time you'll have no idea.

But I found out pretty quickly the things that I should be spending my time and the other opportunities that look so good, that if I really dug a little deeper I would've saw that it probably wouldn't have gotten me the reach or exposure that I thought it would have. But I said yes anyway and kind of had to go with it. That's what the first few years look like.

Now I'm really trying to be really careful with how i spend my time, what I say yes to and new projects I start. Like, for 2014, another podcast I am working on that I will release before the New Year is how I set goals and how I set up my business for the New Year.

One thing I'm really focusing on is not creating a bunch of new programs but perfecting the ones I have.

I put so much effort into those three programs, and I always want to make them better, so I want to make the content better, I want to market smarter, and I want to really focus on building, or filling up those funnels so that people can get exposed to these three programs I put so much time into. So when you're thinking about your own business, instead of thinking about all of the new things you're going to create and new people you're going to work with and partnerships you want to do and all of these different things you want to try, 5 that's GOOD, but first I want you to look at your business, how it is right now, what's already working that you can perfect and put on overdrive.

Or, even better, put on autopilot. What's working now that you can put on autopilot so you don't have to constantly be working at it but it will be producing for you over and over again? I'm going to give you some tools to help you do that today but I think it's really important that we look at what we already have and what's already working for us instead of constantly creating new things and we have a bunch of stuff that's maybe good, but not great. I want all of my stuff to be stellar, and the way that I do that is I'm going to create less but make what I do have even better. It's just my philosophy, how it works for me, but I know it really allows me to cut down on the stress and be feeling like I'm being pulled in a million different directions.

Okay, so let's switch gears now and talk about my team. Now, again, this is a small but mighty team. I'm going to tell you exactly who's on my team and how many hours they work a week and then who I actually do contract work with, versus taking them on the team--or putting them on a team with a monthly retainer.

I have a VA, her name is Trivinia, and she is AMAZING. I love her dearly. What Trivinia does, really, is manage SO many emails that come in each week. Thousands of emails that come in each week, and she manages support@amyporterfield.com, amy@amyporterfield.com and a few other different ones that we have up there.

This is really, really valuable to me, because before, I was getting all of these emails, for at least a year and a half of my business in the beginning. At that time I wasn't getting as many emails, but they were starting to really get me overwhelmed because every time I went in my inbox there were so many emails that needed attention right away, and people had to wait a long time to hear from me because I couldn't keep up. So that's when I knew "Okay, I've got to do something about this."

So Trivinia, what she does is, she'll filter everything. So requests for me to speak on stage, requests for me to do online presentations or online summits and webinars and all that good stuff, or to get interviewed on other people's podcasts. All those requests go through her, as well as people are constantly emailing me Facebook questions and she'll take care of those as well.

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